Coordinating Autonomous Planners

We present a framework for coordinating autonomous planning agents. Together, these agents have to achieve a set of interdependent (elementary) tasks. Each of the agents receives a unique subset of tasks to achieve, but an agent may be dependent on other agents completing (some of) their tasks first. Each of the agents needs to make a plan in order to achieve its set of subtasks. Task dependencies between tasks assigned to different agents, however, prevent them from making plans independently. Therefore, in order to guarantee planning autonomy, we need a pre-planning coordination method. We introduce a coordination method that can be used to guarantee a solution to the joint planning problem whatever individual plans the agents may have constructed independently. As a byproduct of our research, we show how this method can be applied to (re)use existing planning tools in a multi-agent context, by solving a multi-modal logistic planning problem by coordinating several autonomous vehicle routing planners.